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Sunday, September 18, 2016

Windy Road Insanity

Sandpoint, Idaho to Deception Pass, Washington (4,855-5,260)

Snap-crackle-pop.

No, I'm not having a lively cereal for
breakfast. I'm 30 miles west of Spokane, Washington on Highway 2, and the sound comes from behind, down low, where the derailleur attaches
to the bike frame. I stop and twist around. My chain is broken,
derailleur ripped off the bike and sucked into the cassette. I
dismount and turn my bike upside down, study the situation while
trucks rumble past. I have a spare master link, which will allow me
to stitch the chain back together, but I've lost the ability to shift
gears and I'll have to turn the bike into a one-speed. Gone are 26
speeds, several of which I would have used to ride up the hills
between here and the city.

I thread the chain out of the
derailleur, and it falls to the ground. Littering isn't my style, so
I pick up the derailleur and tuck it under a taut bungee cord. The
derailleur is twisted out of shape, no fixing it—

"Do you need some help?"

I'd been so concentrated on my problem
I didn't notice the SUV stopped on the other side of the road. I look
from my bike to the woman outside the driver's door, back down at my
bike, back up at the woman. I can
repair the bike enough so it's rideable, but there isn't a doubt in
my mind that I'll have to push the steeper hills. The woman repeats
her question. She's in her forties, has brown hair and wears a dark t-shirt and plaid pants, looks at me expecting an answer.

Cancer survivor volunteering at a bake sale to help kids

"No," I say. "No thanks.
I'm okay."

We talk across the road, yelling over
the vehicle noise rushing past.

"Are you sure?" she says.

I look down at my greasy hands, at the
disabled bike, try to ferret out why I'm reluctant to accept the
offer. She looks nice enough, no danger there, and it sure would be
nice to get to a bike shop right away, so why my hesitation? I think
it boils down to self-reliance. I have the tools and the skills to
solve this problem—

She walks across the road, comes right
up to me.

"I saw you and turned around,"
she says.

We both stare down at my bike, more
than a little disgustedly.

"I drove past," she says,
"but then I turned around because I'd want someone to stop if I
was in your shoes. Name's Stormy."

She holds out a hand, and I turn my
palms up, showing her the grease on my skin. Stormy tells me she
works construction, isn't scared of dirt, shakes my hand anyway. Then
she goes back to her car and drives it to this side of the road.
Apparently my bike is going to Spokane, with or without me. We cram
it into the hatchback and off we go, making small talk about nothing
important. I ask if there's a bike shop on this side of town. Stormy
swerves and slams on the brakes, and I brace my hands on the dash.
The car veers off the road, and she holds her phone to her nose.

"Got a GPS in this thing,"
she says. "If I can figure out how to work it."

She comes up with a location, revs the
engine, veers back onto the road. Tires screech behind us and horns
blow. I hold back a grin. The adventure continues, this time with a
maniac driver. We talk as the car rips toward
town, and I glance at the speedometer from time to time. I guess
traveling 90 on a 55 mile-per-hour road isn't that bad. At least we
aren't going double over the speed limit. She slows down and
tailgates a Fedex van, taps her phone.

"Why isn't she talking to me?"
she says.

Stormy taps her phone again, then bangs
it against the steering wheel. Holding it to her nose, she stares at
it for a little too long and the car veers off the road onto the
shoulder. She yanks the wheel to the left and the car goes back onto
the road, then she yanks the wheel to the right and we fly over a
hump into a parking lot.

"Talk to me!" She taps a
mysterious Morse Code on the face of her phone. "There!"

We exit the parking lot and merge with
traffic, and the sweet voice of the GPS woman says our destination is
a mile up on the right.

"Fixed it," Stormy says.

She drops me off at the shop and zooms
into traffic, and I roll my bike to the side of the building. I watch
her swerve from lane to lane, smile as she vanishes into the city.
She was part of my life for only fifty minutes or so, but I doubt
I'll ever forget her. I just wish fixing my bike was as easy and
cheap as tapping buttons on a cell phone.

The bike shop has the chain and
derailleur, but they don't stock the hanger, which is also broken,
something I didn't realize until I started replacing parts. Dan, one of the mechanics at North Division Bicycle, takes an early lunch break and returns with a
hanger he took off his personal bike. The hanger isn't an exact
match, but after a modification I'm off and riding again.

Whew.

Without Dan's generosity I would have
been stuck in Spokane for a week waiting for a new hanger to arrive.
I'm grateful for both him and Stormy, am pleased I once again
have a mechanically sound bike.

*

Arrgghhh.

The southwesterly gusts coming down off
the Cascade Mountains slam against me, slow me until the bike barely
moves. I grit my teeth and pedal onward. Relief is in sight—I
hope—a long hill that branches to the east, a natural wind block
that will alleviate some of my strain. I'm in dry country, moisture
sucked out of the air by the mountain chain to the west, and the brown grasses on the side of the road rustle as their stalks undulate in the wind.

My butt is hurting again, spinning into
the wind does that, and I eye that long east/west hill, urging my
bike to close the distance, to find shelter from this friggin' wind.

Arrgghhh.

Gusts increase to 40 MPH, slowing me
almost to a stop at their worst, and it's all I can do not to scream
out loud in frustration. Screw it. I let go and holler at the wind,
shake my fist at it, holler some more.

The demonstration doesn't help; it's
still windy and I'm still frustrated.

Then I'm there—FINALLY—behind the
long hill, the shelter I've been eyeing for the last few hours, and
immediately my speedometer climbs up to 12 MPH, which is more or less
my cruising speed.

"No!"

The devil wind changes direction,
abruptly, now blowing from the west, directly into my face. It's
stronger than ever, a sinister evil force trying to stop my ride, and
I gear down and pedal onward. The wind isn't evil, of course. It's
just wind, but try telling that to a cyclist who pedals against it
for six or seven hours. Sure, early in the day, when you're fresh
from a good night's sleep, the wind is nothing more than an obstacle
to overcome. It's a benign irritation—a muscle soreness that will
go away—a hill that will end—a thorn that will work its way out
of your skin. I'm not sure when the wind morphs from obstacle to evil
entity, but it surely does and apparently there's no escaping its
wrath on the eastern side of the Cascades.

I ride closer to the mountains, stop
and drink a few swallows of water. I walked across the Pacific Crest
in 1997, a PCT thru-hike, and I remember getting caught in a storm on
Goat Rocks, a narrow ridge line with drops of over a thousand feet on
both sides. The wind was so fierce I was almost blown over the side,
and I went from standing to crawling to lying on my belly in the
space of two seconds. The wind was trying to kill me, nudging me
constantly to the edge, and I threw a leg over the upwind side of the
ridge to stay in place. The storm blew over in short order, and I
continued my trek across the rocks.

Now, so many years later, facing the
broken skyline, with its ridges and peaks jutting into the blue sky,
I think about that near-death experience and try to use it in some
way, find no correlation between then and now. The wind on Goat Rocks
was trying to kill me, to blow me over the side and dash me on the
jumble of boulders far below, but this wind, this being that blows
against me today, this vicious monster, has its own desires.

It wants to drive me insane.

I giggle madly and
shove my water bottle back into its holder. What kind of madman will
I become? Surely not a dangerous one, at least not someone who will
hurt another human. No, I'll become the bearded, long-haired guy, the
one who smells and wears dirty clothes, the bent and broken man who
talks to himself as he pushes his crammed-full grocery cart down the
sidewalk. When people try to help me, perhaps handing me a quarter or
two, I'll look at them with glazed eyes and mumble, the wind, the
wind, the wind, the wind. . . .

This wind.

Arrgghh.

But then, with the
grace of a purely sung song, the road makes a turn to the south and
the headwind becomes a shoulder wind. Though stiff shoulder winds are
annoying, because they try to either push you into the highway or off
the road completely, I can pedal in them without too much extra
effort. The wind morphs from evil entity to just wind, and I cycle
onward—sanity restored, peaceful in mind and body, a man who fought
through a devilish gauntlet and came out the other side.

*

I pedal over the
Pacific Crest at Stevens Pass, coast down the highway and stop in the first town down the mountainside. I meet a few PCT
thruhikers who are in town to resupply, wish them well and continue
my journey. A couple of days later, I camp at Deception Pass, the
point in my journey where I turn to the south and head toward
Seattle, the first star in Ride between the Stars. Jets take off from a nearby base, engines roaring so loud my tent
quivers from the vibrations, and I put in my earbuds and try to sleep. The jets continue this routine for half the
night, startling me awake on each pass, and I revisit the vision of
the old man pushing the cart, this time whispering, thejets,
the jets, the jets.

Deception Pass

Sometime
in the dark hours after midnight, the flying ceases and peace returns
to my campsite. Good, I like peace. I drift off to sleep, thinking
about Seattle, Seattle, Seattle.